Russia's Struggle With Modernity 1815-1929 [1 ed.]

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Contents Front Matter......................................................3 Title Page......................................................3 Publisher Information....................................4 Preface..........................................................5 Russia’s Struggle With Modernity 1815-1929.....8 The Fear Of Modernity..................................8 The Results of 1812......................................11 Pobedonostsev, Witte, Stolypin And...............20 The Evolution Of The Revolutionary.............30 Lenin’s Journey............................................37 The lessons of the Civil War...........................43 The Gulags and the First Five Year Plan........59 Back Matter.....................................................70 Also Available..............................................70

RUSSIA’S STRUGGLE WITH MODERNITY 1815-1929 20th Century Russia Part One

by

Nick Shepley

Publisher Information

Published in 2013 by Andrews UK Limited www.andrewsuk.com The right of Nick Shepley to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 Copyright © 2013 Nick Shepley All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Preface In 1931 Joseph Stalin gave an edict to the Communist Party and the Soviet bureaucracy that was to have profound consequences for every man, woman and child in the Soviet Union. It was so important that it would later decide much of the outcome of World War Two. It was an order to industrialise Russia on a scale, and at a pace that had never before been seen in human history. It was an order that would have human consequences and entail human suffering on an equally unparalleled scale. Stalin’s Orders To the Economic Executives was steeped in the lessons of Russia’s often tragic past. It reminded members of the Communist Party what the price had been in the past for those rulers who had ignored the importance of modernising Russia: “To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her -- because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: “You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia.” Those gentlemen were quite familiar with the verses of the old poet. They beat her, saying: “You are abundant,” so one can enrich oneself at your expense. They beat her, saying: “You are poor and impotent,” so you can be beaten and plundered with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiters -- to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle

law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak -- therefore you are wrong; hence you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty -- therefore you are right; hence we must be wary of you. That is why we must no longer lag behind. In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have had one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will uphold its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution-”Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.” We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or we shall go under. That is what our obligations to the workers and peasants of the U.S.S.R. dictate to us.” In this, the first of two ebooks, we will first look deep into Russia’s past to see how her Czars effectively resisted political and economic modernisation in the 19th Century. Hopefully, this should show us how they built up the systemic crisis that led to Czardom’s collapse in1917. We will examine how the formative years of the Bolshevik and later the Communist Party forged the ideological vision that would bring these massive changes about. We’ll also look at the lives and ideas of both Lenin and Stalin in relation to the almost impossible task of modernising Russia, and we will examine the scale, and the human costs of this epic undertaking. In the second volume we will examine the industrial society that Stalin created,

its people, culture, is slavery and its near destruction in 1941. We will also see how its war industries saved the USSR and made her a world power to be reckoned with.

The Fear Of Modernity If we want to fully understand the scale of the task that faced the Communist State after the Russian Civil War then we really have to step back into the 19th Century to examine why Russia, unlike the rest of Western Europe failed to industrialise. It was the last Czar, Nicholas II’s contention that most of Russia’s contemporary problems could actually be attributed to her greatest westerniser greatest moderniser, Peter the Great. Nicholas II disliked St Petersburg, Peter’s modern European city, modelled on the NeoClassicist architecture that was prevalent in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Madrid. This architecture was steeped in European thinking, in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, in scientific revolutions, radical new thought on the scope and the role of government. These new ideas questioned the nature of the individual and his or her potential, and worst of all in Nicholas’s view, it challenged religion as a superstition. The Enlightenment, a century and a half of radical new ideas that started with the likes of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, swept away old superstitious ideas about the nature of the universe and established much of modern scientific thinking. The implications of this on economics, politics philosophy and culture led in no small part to the French Revolution. The sweeping away a bankrupt state in its entirety, by men armed with modern ideas had been resolutely resisted by most Czars that followed Peter. Peter the Great, who ruled nearly a century before the revolution, had no interest in diminishing his power with anything as naive as liberal democracy, but he did take on board one new innovation from the West; modern bureaucracy and a restructuring of the army on European lines. Peter died just before the dawn of the 18th Century, but lived through a time where in Europe nations like England and Holland were becoming major maritime powers,

establishing financial innovations such a national debts in order to punch well above their weight on a global level. Christopher Wren remodelled London as a modern planned stone built city, using the latest scientific architectural innovations and in the aftermath of the 30 years war the continent was awash with state of the art military know how. Peter was the first Czar to set foot out of Muscovy and saw the new Europe with his own eyes and was instantly taken with it, he knew where the future lay. It was Nicholas II’s contention that when Peter the Great decided to create a modern civil service, he created an almost blasphemous barrier between the divinely appointed Czar and the ordinary Russians who were in Nicholas’s eyes the children of the Czar. What Peter established was an new and original, if schismatic direction in Russian society, known loosely as the ‘Petrine Tradition’, it was western looking, modern and assured of the notion that Europe held the answers. During Peter’s reign a steady stream of foreign experts in all fields came to Russia to assist in the Czar’s designs. It is worth acknowledging at this point a few of the many shortcomings of Nicholas, and why exactly he was so adamant in his criticism. Nicholas II embraced a wholly different tradition in Russian discourse, one that commentators have described as being ‘Muscovite’. Nicholas, who ruled from 1894 to 1917 moved his royal court to Moscow, capital of the ancient medieval kingdom of Muscovy. In doing this he symbolised to the rest of the country his desire to step back into the past. Instead of a uniform or a suit as befitted the modern 19th Century monarch, Nicholas sometimes indulged in dressing up as a medieval Boyar (Russian Noble of the elite rank), and the fact that this fantasy world existed in Nicholas’s mind at the same time that enormously pressing modern problem bore down upon him is no coincidence; as the pressure of modernity encroached on Nicholas, he retreated into a romanticised day dream world, imaging an idealised past. The rot that Nicholas believed had set in during Peter’s reign, and never really quite left, was the break in the sacred bond between the

Czar and his people. Nicholas assumed a lot of peasant Russia, he believed the average peasant an inherently loyal and benign character, but based this assumption on virtually no first hand experience. The only peasants he ever met were those who had been hand picked and groomed to be presentable to the Czar at the palace - Nicholas would have had very little to say to them anyway as he spoke far better French and English than he did Russian. The birth of the modern world was due to the confluence of two revolutions, the British industrial revolution and the French political and social revolution, and a period of radical social and political upheaval marked the last decades of the 18th Century and the first decades of the 19th, it is a period of time that Marxist Historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the period of the dual revolution . The French revolution in particular sent shockwaves throughout Europe, from Spain to Poland, from England to Greece; the very idea that instead of being ruled by an autocrat, the people had the chance to renegotiate the terms, and that populations would simply not submit to be ruled any more if the basic requirements for living were not being provided changed the relationship between ruler and ruled across Europe for good. The vast economic output and the new wealth of Great Britain, signified by her huge naval power and growing colonial acquisitions in Asia (and up until the late 1770s America) demonstrated how mercantilism had captured global markets in the name of the crown and the City of London. These dual revolutions would be vigorously resisted by Russia throughout the 19th Century, but western ideas, in the form of Marxist Leninism would explode in Russia at the Dawn of the 20th; the arguments that Karl Marx set forth in the Communist Manifesto and in Das Kapital were the product of the meeting of both revolutions.

The Results of 1812 In 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor Of France and ruler of most of Europe looked to Russia as his final and greatest conquest. France’s armies had marched the values of the revolution of 1789 across Europe over the previous two decades, destroying the Ancien Regime wherever they went. In 1796 Napoleon invaded and conquered Italy, then an appendage to the Austrian Empire. He unified the disparate and fragmented kingdoms and city states into a united Kingdom of Italy, with himself as king, of course. He swept away the fragmented system of law and replaced it with the standard Napoleonic Code, giving a sense of uniformity and cohesion to the peninsula. To many the idea of Italian nationhood was born with Napoleon, which is largely why there was such a vigorous reaction to liberalism in Italy after the war, Austria and the other powers at the Congress of Vienna crushed any hint of modern liberal democracy. In 1812 Czar Alexander I had incurred the wrath of Bonaparte, he had broken the alliance he had made (under duress) with the French to join them in a crusade against Britain. In discussions between the Czar and the Emperor in 1807 the idea of a joint quest against British India was mooted, and though the chances of it being even remotely successful were next to none, the motivation for Napoleon was clear; rattle the English, make them fear for their empire, bring about the kind of bankrupting massive military overstretch that had cost them the Americas. By 1812, however, not only had there been no military action against Britain, but the Russians were still trading with her. Napoleon told his men: “Soldiers, the second war of Poland is started; the first finished in Tilsit. In Tilsit, Russia swore eternal alliance in France and war in England. It violates its oaths today. Russia is pulled by its fate; its destinies must be achieved! Does it thus believe us degenerated?

Thus let us go ahead; let us pass Neman River, carry the war on its territory. The second war of Poland will be glorious with the French Armies like the first one.” Napoleon daily decree, June 22, 1812.” He intended to legitimise his invasion of Russia by claiming to defend the Poles, but the Russians were not fooled. A darker thought even than invasion lurked at the back of the minds of the Czar and his court. Even in defeat, royal houses from across Europe had been treated very well bey Napoleon, as soon as treaties and alliances had been imposed upon them, it was very much a case of business as usual, the top tier of society would most likely go largely unmolested. In Russia, however, the threat of modernisation, of the spread of French republican values, liberty and equality were terrifying, Russia relied on a vast sea of serfs to make its agricultural economy function, to serve in the country houses of the rich, to dig ditches, fight wars and dig coal. The conditions of the serfs in Russia were roughly comparable to the slaves of the American South, and it seemed almost inevitable to the ruling classes of Russia that a Bonapartist victory in Russia would see them set free. Not only would this cause the very fabric of the Russian economy to collapse, but many country nobles, isolated on their estates, surrounded by a simmering resentment, were darkly fearful of what might be unleashed by Bonaparte. Russia’s great patriotic war saw the destruction of Napoleon’s Grande Armee, the use of scorched earth methods and the murderous Russian winter brought about the epic defeat the Emperor. The sick, half starved and battered army that limped back through Poland in the greatest withdrawal and defeat for Napoleon, proved something very important to the Czar, that the unstoppable might of the revolutionary armies of France could be defeated by the immovable object of Russia. The Czar and his court, and indeed much of the literary and intellectual classes of Russia took this lesson one step further. They believed that autocracy itself had triumphed over revolution, that the threatening tide of modernity had been

turned back. They were convinced that in Russia alone, that god had spoken and had adjudicated that the changes that Napoleon would have brought to Russia were a sin and a heresy, and the divinely appointed Czar would be allowed to rule by celestial interventional ever more. The view amongst many Russian nationalists was that the nations of Europe that had thrown off their ancien regime rulers were blaspheming, and that Russia, on her separate historical trajectory, one which did not necessarily involve development or change, could insulate herself from such sins. The rest simply breathed a sigh of relief and serfdom would have to wait another five decades, until after the disaster of the Crimean War, before it would even begin to be dismantled. Russian Officers in Paris in 1814, after the first exile of Bonaparte to the island of Elba, and before the battle of Waterloo, were surprised by the sights that greeted them. Having defeated the French at Leipzig and subsequently besieged Paris, the grand coalition of Russians, Prussians and Austrians were divided on how to proceed. Francis I of Austria was more interested in making peace with France, but both Alexander I and Frederick III of Prussia wanted conquest. Alexander insisted on revenge and had a wider point to make to his people, that traditional Russia had finally prevailed over revolutionary Europe. Napoleon, a virtual prisoner in Fontainebleau passively waited for the allied armies to arrive. Russian officer Mihailovski-Danilevski wrote: “He remained a silent witness of the triumph of Alexander in Paris.” The Prussian Heinrich Steffans was contemptuous of the rapturous applause that the allied armies received, judging it to be false and hypocritical. He wrote: “Every well-dressed man in the streets wore a white cockade (symbol of Bourbons). One would have taken the scene for the triumphant entrance of a French army which had annihilated a dangerous and detested foe. Yet at that very moment the hero who had subdued the whole continent of Europe, and who had made France the ruler of the nations, surrounded but by a few faithful

troops, and deserted by his people, was sinking to destruction. I confess that in that moment the Parisians were contemptible in my sight.” Fydor Glinka, who would go on to become one of the most famous writers in Russia of his era was greatly impressed by Paris, by how clean, orderly, modern and well designed it was. The city, its healthy and well fed inhabitants, relatively low levels of crime and social cohesion was something of a mystery to Glinka and his fellow Russian officers. How had so advanced a civilisation been beaten? The first indications that the Czar’s triumphalism and his wholehearted advocacy of reaction were misplaced came within a decade of his triumph over Napoleon. The Russians didn’t intervene at Waterloo, but the fact that they would have done if the British and their allies had been defeated was one of the factors that led the emperor to realise it was a lost cause and accept exile to St Helena. Ironically, towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars Alexander did show the first inkling of a more liberal temperament, suggesting the a limited constitution in Poland might be acceptable , and making this statement on his perception of how a post war world out to look. He argued that universal rights for individuals could only be protected “after having attached the nations to their government by making these incapable of acting save in the greatest interests of their subjects, to fix the relations of the states amongst each other on more precise rules, and such as it is to their interest to respect.” By 1818 however, he shifted firmly back towards reaction. At the Congress of Vienna, the post war reordering of Europe, Alexander positioned Russia as Europe’s heavy handed policeman, who, along with Russia, would protect authoritarian regimes across the continent. The regimes that were installed from Paris to Rome to Budapest were deliberately backward looking, designed to be resistant to political and to economic modernisation; Russia was pivotal in making this new settlement work and it was Europe’s burgeoning middle classes who were left disenfranchised. Three decades of agitating later and an explosion of revolutionary fury across Europe by the bourgeoisie of those countries dominated

by the Vienna agreement was contained and crushed in part by Russia. Alexander died in 1825 of typhus, triggering the revolt of the modernisers within Russia. Alexander’s elder son, Crown Prince Constantine renounced the throne secretly in 1822, but on the death of his father it was simply assumed by most Russians that he was the Czar. When it became apparent that he would not take the throne, succession passed the Nicholas I, but the confusion over succession was the excuse that the Decembrists, a progressive group of nobles demanding a written constitution, needed. The Decembrists were predominantly made up of the very army officers who had marvelled over the progressive nature of France. They were divided into two groups, the Northern Society, who wanted change on a British model, an end to serfdom and a limited constitution and small franchise, the creation of a constitutional monarchy. The Southern Society wanted a more radical republican revolution and a redistribution of land. Pavel Pestel, the army officer who inspired the movement and led it down a more revolutionary path admitted that it would be difficult to get the nobility on board with their plans to abolish serfdom: “The desirability of granting freedom to the serfs was considered from the very beginning; for that purpose a majority of the nobility was to be invited in order to petition the Emperor about it. This was later thought of on many occasions, but we soon came to realise that the nobility could not be persuaded. And as time went on we became even more convinced, when the Ukrainian nobility absolutely rejected a similar project of their military governor.” The Decembrist revolt was crushed and the conspirators publicly hanged, and in the act of denying any change, Czar Nicholas set Russia on a trajectory that would result in a far more radical

revolution ninety years later; given the scale of the horrors inflicted on Russia after 1917 it is easy to see now how missed an opportunity the Decembrist revolt was. In many ways modernity was the downfall of Nicholas I as well, who died a broken man during the Crimean War. During the final months of the siege of Sebastopol, as the British built a railway from Balaclava where their ships were moored to the trenches around the city in order to ship cannon shot, the best the Russians could hope for were icons of saints, blessed by the Czar. The Russians, who had put up a determined defence of Sebastopol simply did not have the level of industrialisation to churn out munitions that her enemies, France and Britain did; the old certainties that Russia had relied on, a vast peasant army and a vast untamed hinterland no longer mattered, and the new Czar Alexander II could see that. The popular view of Alexander II is that he was by temperament a natural reformer, indeed his upbringing and education was deeply coloured by reformist and liberal voices. His childhood mentor was the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, part of the Russian romantic movement and deeply influenced by the French Revolution, much as the romantics in Western Europe had been. Alexander was in fact less of a moderniser than some commentators claim, he was a simply guided by a series of seemingly unavoidable truths, Russia had lost the Crimean War and been robbed of the great power status she had held for forty years, her invincibility had proven illusory and her backwardness was to blame. The institution of serfdom was recognised by Alexander as the most fundamental cause of Russia’s ills, a Russian variant of a modern capitalist economy could not exist alongside a feudal society, the latter must be eradicated if the former were to thrive. More crucially, unlike in 1812, by 1855 the ability of the ruling classes to contain the discontent of the serfs was slowly be surely failing. Serious unrest had broken out in southern Russia during the war when Serfs who believed they would be emancipated if they enlisted, discovered at recruitment centres that there would be no freedom for them, simply the chance to fight for holy Russia.

The nobles were determined to undermine any attempt to rob them of a vast sea of free labour, many noble estates had long since fallen into debt (often the result of the Russian upper classes love affair with gambling) and could not realistically hope to adapt to bring modern agribusiness with paid employees. Emancipation would see the process of decline of the upper classes completed and would create the space within the economy for the rise of the enemies of all arch reactionaries, the middle classes. Russia’s small bourgeoisie was confined to certain professions such as science and law (disciplines frowned upon in Russian universities) but the jobs with real influence, in the bureaucracy were the preserve of the aristocracy. The edict of emancipation in 1861 was so neatly undermined by the aforementioned bureaucrats, who were chiefly interested in their family estates, that it led to riots amongst the newly emancipated serfs. Firstly, they were freed without a guarantee of land. Instead they were given the land that landowners chose to give them, often far away from the fertile soil they normally ploughed. Russian landowners kept the good soil that had been tilled by serfs for themselves and gave the newly ‘free’ men and women stony or marshy ground. Secondly, the landowners were compensated for the loss of the serfs and land by t government, and the serfs themselves had to compensate the government for this. The freed peasants discovered they had enormous debts, often for poor soil and still they were required to submit to the cruelties meted out upon them by authoritarian Land Captains, the Czar’s new countryside enforcers. Alexander’s interior minister Dmitri Tolstoy (no relation to the novelist) employed former landowners agents and rural policemen to act like feudal tyrants in many parts of peasant Russia, reminding the peasants that they were only notionally free and that a full range of civil rights certainly did not apply to them. Despite the failure of the emancipation, Alexander’s reforms continued, he reformed the Russian Army and civil service along

French lines, he briefly toyed with educational reform, but this was quickly scrapped when the newly liberalised universities began to produce politicised radicals. Alexander refused to reform the autocracy of Russia, he did not want a Decembrist style constitutional monarchy, though there is some evidence that he he was starting to appreciate the need for a limited constitution just before his death. The student intelligentsia that Alexander suppressed, with the backing and assistance of Tolstoy formed the nucleus of the early revolutionary movement in Russia, a movement that assassinated Alexander in 1881. The so called Czar liberator was murdered by terrorist underground group the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) as he rode by carriage through St Petersburg. The first bomb simply damaged the carriage and the angry emperor stepped out of the vehicle to examine the damage. The second bomb was thrown directly at Alexander and it proved fatal, both for him and for Russia’s chances of reform. Alexander was carried bleeding into the Winter Palace, his legs severed at the knees, he was laid in a sheet on a billiards table where he died. His shy, nervous grandson, Nicholas, saw his last moments of agony and was deeply affected by them, but most likely he never learned of the tragic irony that sealed Alexander’s fate. Alexander was murdered because finally he was giving some thought to a limited constitution, one which would have seen some degree of representative government, a constitutional limitation of executive powers and perhaps even a bill of rights. It was precisely what the revolutionary underground did not want, the threat of gradual and progressive change was deeply dangerous to their cause, only a continuation of reaction (which was certainly what they got with Alexander III, the new Czar). Throughout the reigns of the final two Czars of Russia, modernisation and industrialisation would prove to be a political and cultural battleground over which autocrats and ministers would struggle.

From 1881 to 1894 the country was ruled by Alexander, who looked upon the anarchy in Russia as a direct result of his father’s reforms. His view that Pan Slavic Nationalism, worship of the Czar autocrat as a divine father figure and belief in the Orthodox faith would be the three things that would save Russia. It was this direction that would suffocate the growing industrial revolution that was belatedly taking hold in Russia. Alexander II had made some steps towards providing an environment where industry might take root, but for the most part enterprise occurred in spite of the government, not as a result of it.

Pobedonostsev, Witte, Stolypin And The Twilight Of The Romanovs Of the many advisors to Alexander III and Nicholas II from the 1890s onwards, the three most significant men, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin all tried in vain, based on their persuasions and prejudices, to rescue the Romanov dynasty. Konstantin Pobedonostsev attempted to rescue it from the ever present threat as he saw it of modernisation, Westernisation and an abandonment of autocracy and Orthodoxy. He was a mentor to the two final Czars of Russia and his influence cast a long shadow over the final two decades of the Autocracy, he, like Alexander III stood as a bulwark against modernisation, firmly believing that not only did Russia not need an industrial revolution, but that the beginnings of industrialism were the seeds of subversion in Russia. By 1880 Pobedonostsev had been appointed Procurator of the Holy Synod by Alexander II and in effect by the time of Alexander’s death he ruled the Russian Church, ensuring that there Orthodoxy remained deeply conservative in its outlook. As a mentor to Alexander III, Pobedonostsev helped him to draft the Manifesto on Unshakable Autocracy in 1881, which saw a revocation of some of the more progressive measures introduced by his father and the reinforcement of the idea of absolutist monarchy. The idea that a representative assembly could be voted for, even from a very limited franchise, was swept aside, and with it, the chances of building a democratic framework within which modernisation was possible. When Alexander died unexpectedly in 1894, Nicholas inherited Pobedonostsev. It is thought by some historians that because the new Czar was weak, vacillating and came under the influence of his

blustering uncle the Grand Duke Mikhail and his wife the Czarina Alexandra, that Pobedonostsev’s power was diminished. This might be true, but it is important to note that Nicholas was deeply rooted in all of Pobedonostsev’s ideas, believing wholeheartedly in Autocracy, Orthodoxy and the sanctity of Slav Russia. The ever impressionable Czarevich also took onboard one of Pobedonostsev’s other obsessions, anti semitism. It was Pobedonostsev who was the chief architect of and propagandist for the anti Jewish pogroms that blighted the lives of Jews in Ukraine and Western Russia in the 1890s and 1900s and both Czars were happy to endorse them. In 1896 in his ‘Reflections of a Russian Statesman’, he wrote: “Among the falsest of political principles is the principle of the sovereignty of the people, the principle that all power issues from the people, and is based upon the national will - a principle which has unhappily become more firmly established since the time of the French Revolution. Thence proceeds the theory of Parliamentarianism, which, up to the present day, has deluded much of the so-called “intelligentsia,” and unhappily infatuated certain foolish Russians. It continues to maintain its hold on many minds with the obstinacy of a narrow fanaticism, although every day its falsehood is exposed more clearly to the world.” He made a clear distinction between the nature of the individual in Russia and in Europe. to Pobedonostsev, individualism in England seemed compatible with the orderly and law abiding English national character, in Russia it was lethal, the Slav was an anarchic creature and needed firm rulership to guide him. Pobedonostsev’s retreat into Muscovite feudalism was at odds with all prevailing historical trends, the march towards French style constitutional change and British (and latest German) industrial innovation was evident across the continent and had long been manifesting in Russia itself. Pobedonostsev imposed his values on Alexander III and Nicholas II, neither of whom were in any way gifted intellectually, and both of whom eagerly embraced his Slavophile reactionary world view. He was very much the Canute

of his times however, for all his disdain for political and industrial modernisation, it was an unstoppable force that would in one way or another engulf Czarism. If Pobedonostsev represented a march into the past, a denial of European enlightenment values, then Sergei Witte was his polar opposite, a man with Dutch heritage who physically and intellectually stood on the side of prevailing economic trends. Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte was an anomaly at the courts of both Alexander III and Nicholas II, he had a strong aristocratic pedigree through his mother’s side of the family, but he had risen to prominence largely through his endeavours in the realm of private industry and commerce. Even the Romanovs, who looked upon modern industry and the middle class it had generated with a mixture of disdain and suspicion could not argue against the utility that railways, steam powered battleships and well made rifles were bringing to their empire; Witte was more than just a necessary evil for a time, he was part of a trend that the Czars hoped they could manage or balance against the more influential calls for a return to an imagined past. Witte made his name in the railway business, the vast expanses of Russia were for the first time connected together by this new and modern innovation, just as at the same the USA was becoming united in the same way. Witte’s management of the Odessa Railway in the Ukraine in the 1870s received him plaudits from the Czar (even though he had been temporarily jailed for four months due to a railway accident) because he helped to speedily transport troops to the front in order to fight the Turks in the Russo Turkish war of 1877. He was both an advocate of economic and social modernisation, the very epitome of a European liberal, who believed that with greater economic expansion and the intervention of a more liberal state, the social conditions of the poor could be improved. After coming to the attention of Alexander III (he pointed out some glaring safety problems involving the royal train, problems that were soon to prove fatal when the train derailed in 1888 killing

12 people) Witte was appointed Railway Minister. From 1889 to 1891 he oversaw the commencement of the biggest railway building project in the world to date, the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway, linking Russia’s West to her Pacific East and Vladivostok. Witte once again showed his allegiance to values that were alien to the autocracy, by establishing the right to appoint his staff based on merit. The old practices of patronage and appointment through birth meant substantially less at the railway ministry, which was deeply alarming to aristocracy, who relied on the civil service for employment. Living off the proceeds of country estates was no longer the convenient source of income it had once been and access to top jobs, irrespective of ability or merit, was a vital lifeline of wealth and influence for the landed gentry. Witte felt secure enough to expound the ideas of Friedrich List, the German economist who argued that ‘infant industries’ needed state protection in order to flourish. List was dubious about embracing free trade in all its forms and suspected (rightly) that Britain’s insistence on free trade was contradicted by her control of so much world trade with her empire. What was appealing to Witte was List’s ideas on national economics, as opposed to the more British idea of an individual economics. Adam Smith, the Scottish ‘father’ of modern economics argued that individual self interest and the maximisation of personal utility in a market place represented a virtue, but for List and Witte there was a more important economic imperative. The actions not of the individual but of the nation (represented at this point by the state) were more important, as a social economics would ensure the community as a whole benefitted. Witte, like Pobedonostsev was dubious about the effect that rampant individualism might have in Russia, believing the ordinary Russian to be a chaotic and anarchic creature. More importantly List seemed to describe to Witte the trajectory that Russia was on and where her interests were best served, he argued that societies evolved in stages, the highest economic advancement being that here agriculture, commerce and industry combine

to make a seamless system. He was also a passionate advocate of railways, believing them to be indispensable for the modern nation. 1891 was a pivotal year for Russia, it was the year that Witte’s arguments temporarily prevailed, Russian industry was protected by a new customs law, brought about in no small part by Witte’s efforts. This one piece of legislation saw a flourishing of industry and commerce in Russia and probably owes more to Alexander’s nationalist instincts that his economic acumen. It would have far reaching consequences too, in kick starting Russian economic development It saw a rapid and unplanned influx of peasants from the impoverished and famine stricken countryside, swelling the numbers already trapped in urban slum dwellings. It saw an ever greater polarisation of opinion at the top, with ever more reactionary Russian conservatives claiming there was something deeply unnatural and un-Russian about the growth of factories, bespoiling Russia’s land and people. These arguments were remarkably similar to those put forward by English romantics nearly a century beforehand, complaining about the same process evolving in England. It was the growth in urban slums, however, that suggested to the revolutionary underground that some of the conditions for revolution that Marx had predicted were now at hand in Russia, a theme we shall return to in the next section. When Witte was appointed minister of finance, he held the keys to Russian economic policy for over a decade and his influence on the country is hard to overstate. Witte was almost alone in the top echelons of government in understanding how the relationship between state and industry could be harnessed to provide wealth and stability, two things that late Imperial Russia badly needed. He saw this link most crucially in the issue of state education, understanding that western success relied heavily on educated workers. The same debates that were heard in Britain, long before the Forster Act in 1870 made education both free and compulsory, were heard in Russia in the 1890s. The aristocracy feared an educated workforce and thought that Witte was both mad and heretical, a man who

might well bring society crashing down around their ears. The Czar’s secret police the Ohkrana, had long infiltrated trade unions and other working class organisations and were well aware how dangerous politically radical pamphlets and newspapers could be. Witte pioneered commercial schools that trained workers for industry, gave them valuable trades and skills that they could survive with away from peasant communities, and continued to insist on education and competence being the criteria for appointments to his ministry, not birth. Witte also knew that economic isolationism was not an option for Russia either, he concluded trade deals with Germany and China and invited European businesses to establish themselves in Russia. He managed to integrate Russia into the world economy in a way that no other statesman before or after has been able to, under Witte’s leadership Russia joined the Gold Standard, the global system of exchange that also operated as a means of regulating trade imbalances. This made Russia a far safer bet for foreign businesses, it meant that engineering, mining and chemical companies from Germany, France and even Britain saw fit for the first time to invest. Witte limited working hours for Russians in heavy industry and manufacturing, aware that discontent was easily spread, particularly during times of explosive growth. It was when Witte decided that peasant Russia had to be reformed that he ran out of luck, firstly because any peasant reform would have to involve land reform, which was further erosion of the power and wealth of the nobility. The nobles weren’t the only ones looking to finish Witte’s career, Nicholas II had also decided that the time had come to thwart his most able of servants. Nicholas did not realise the extent of Witte’s loyalty or his foresight, the finance minister was quite the conservative, and wanted nothing more than to see the monarchy in some form thrive; he believed that the only way that could be assured was to create a stable and affluent society, for as we shall

see, on the last two decades of life in Imperial Russia, there was a dramatic upsurge in violent revolutionary radicalism. Nicholas was certain that a mystical link with the peasant peoples of Russia was the source of his authority, and that far from being modernised, the peasantry needed nothing more than orthodoxy and icons to fill them with a patriotic sense of Russian-ness. The ignorance of the Czar in this last instance is astounding, millions of Russian peasants lived and died with only a provincial or even a local sense of identity, the idea of there being a vast Russian nation state to which they were somehow obliged was completely unknown to them. The chief interest of the peasants was land, they adhered to a simplistic, almost anarchic philosophy in the Mir, the Russian Peasant Commune. Land was equally shared by the village council who would appoint a Starosta, or village elder to oversee it’s fair distribution based on need. Nicholas and other Slavophiles, who romanticised this ‘ancient’ and organic people’s institution were, according to Boris Chicherin, deluded. He said that the commune was neither ancient nor a product of the people, but and institution devised for them by the Czars of the 17th and 18th Centuries to reduce the tensions brought about by land hunger, a land hunger principally caused by landowners. Witte was relegated to the ultimately impotent role of Chairman of the Committee of Ministers, a hollow job designed to sideline him and was only rescued from political limbo during the aftermath of the Russo Japanese War and the year of revolution that swept across the country. Witte’s last piece modernising advice to the Czar was to accept a constitution of sorts, end the peasants debts and bribe the middle classes with political reform, separating the most likely source of the revolution’s political leadership from the masses. Once again Witte was proven right, the Czar, through gritted teeth, instituted his suggestions and kept his throne, though was frequently heard cursing Witte’s name. For Witte, however, it spelled the end of his career, he had not only negotiated a peace settlement with Japan,

but also presented the Czar with the only workable strategy he could have employed. He was finally sidelined in 1906 when the new Duma, Russia’s greatly emasculated parliament saw a huge majority of left-wing deputies elected, confirming all the Czar’s worst fears. Witte was forced to resign forthwith, and played no further part in Russian political life. The Czar had been too deeply inured in the doctrines of men like Pobedonostsev, and was too not just weak willed and vacillating, but also maddeningly stubborn, and a man of very superficial intellect, tending to agree with the let opinion he heard. Pyotr Stolypin appeared to the Czar the ideal man for the crisis that was now evident across Russia. Never before had a Czar been so openly defied by the majority of his own people, and Witte’s direct successor Ivan Goremykin lacked the will or the imagination to deal with the situation at all, he was simply an arch reactionary who advocated repression, making it impossible for the Duma to work with him. Stolypin understood that repression had to be allied with progressive social and economic change, particularly in the countryside. The peasants had had their own separate uprising in 1905, an uncoordinated and inarticulate expression of rage against landowners, culminating with the burning and looting of manor houses, the murder or nobles and the possession of the land. Stolypin looked upon this as the far greater threat, as the peasant population of Russia counted for nearly 80 per cent of the entire country, and he k ew that the lessons that Russia had been taught in the past half century of warfare was that a poverty stricken serf then peasant society produced military weakness and decline. Stolypin was as much an outsider as Witte had been, and the two men intensely disliked each other, but in many ways they were two sides of the same coin. Both believed only change and modernisation could save Russia and neither wanted to see an end the Czardom. However, where Witte was liberal in his outlook, Stolypin was a fierce conservative.

His skills in crushing the 1905 revolt in Saratov, where he was governor, were noticed by Goremykin and in the same year he was appointed the new interior minister, during Goremykin’s short rule. Nicholas then appointed him Prime Minister when his predecessor stepped down. Stolypin stabilised the country with no small amount of violence, by 1906 much of Russia was still in chaos, with regional bureaucrats, nobles, politicians and policemen being routinely assassinated by various groups from the revolutionary underground. His response was the establishments of dozens of special courts that delivered swift and brutal justice; between 1906 and 1909 over 3,000 people were hanged. Stolypin sought to reform Russian farming, the Mir or Obschina system of land distribution left peasants with strips of land scattered across the lands of the village, the sum total of lands any peasant could work being periodically reallocated by the village elders based on need. Whilst supposedly egalitarian and anchored deeply in the ancient past of Russia (in fact the Obschina system was largely introduced under Catherine the Great in a bid to prevent strife in peasant Russia) it was neither efficient nor sustainable. As the population grew from the 1870s onwards so did the pressure on the land as plots were divided and subdivided over and over again. New generations of peasant developed greater expectations of life as the turn of the century approached, no longer would the sons of peasant farmers be content to marry and continue to live in their fathers homes with their extended family as was traditional. Peasants now looked to have their own home and plot of land, and it was to this newer generation that Stolypin looked. Stolypin’s grand political vision was for a pacified countryside, and he knew he could not do this through force of arms, but he did believe that he could change the heart of peasant Russia, he could guide the former serfs away from collective ideas (which in his mind were dangerous and had already led to the trouble of 1905). He believed that a prosperous peasant class that privately owned

land would be far more politically conservative and would be able to shake off its anarchic tendencies. Stolypin never lived to find out whether or not this would be possible, his assassination in 1911 was something he himself had long predicted; he was gunned down wearing a bullet proof vest. Stolypin’s murder gives us a few interesting clues about the life and death struggle that was being fought over land reform at the time. The assassin, Dmitri Bogrov, was both a member of the Social Revolutionary Party and an informer for the Okhrana, the Russian Secret Police. Perhaps the murder was an act of political terror, orchestrated by the RS Party, they would have had good reason to murder Stolypin, he had cracked down on political dissent in Russia mercilessly. Bogrov, a Russian Jew also had good reason to kill Stolypin as he had been pivotal in initiating the Czars anti Jewish Pogroms. Many historians suspect foul play on the part of the establishment, however. Stolypin, ever th outside, had continued in the vein of Witte to exclude aristocrats from top jobs and his land reform ideas would have weakened their position in the countryside yet further. Stolypin was mortally wounded in front of the Czar and his two daughters at the ballet in Kiev supposedly apologising with his last words. He died four days later and following Bogrov’s execution the Czar expressly forbade any investigation into the killing. Both Witte and Stolypin were final chances for the Romanov dynasty to embrace and they failed to do so, allowing both men to be defeated by myopic self interest groups in the aristocracy. The Czar’s up and coming favourite at the time of the murder of Stolypin was Grigori Rasputin, the alcoholic Starets (wandering peasant holy man), who practiced the banned khylyst peasant cult that stressed salvation through sin. What better indicator of the Czar’s preferences and proclivities than Rasputin? He had rejected two modernisers and embraced a romanticised figure that embodied for him everything that was simple and honest and godly about Russia.

The Evolution Of The Revolutionary Underground Russia’s violent modernisation in the 1930s was also forged in the 19th Century in a radically different way. By the mid to late 19th Century a vast tapestry of different and competing revolutionary groups existed in Russia, and all of them were vexed by the question of how a revolution would be achievable in a peasant country. By the eve of the revolution these arguments had not been satisfactorily resolved save for within the Bolshevik Party, for it was there that Lenin successfully argued that for a revolution to be successful not only should the party focus on the industrial workers, but that the agrarian peasants actually should not be trusted. The Bolsheviks were well aware that the peasants, poorly educated and not gifted with a revolutionary consciousness like they supposed the workers had (Lenin lived most of his life without ever meeting a member of the working classes), were likely to side with the Czar when the revolution came, and so they were forever a force for reaction. To understand the genesis of this idea we have to examine one of the revolutionary underground’s biggest failures, the ‘To The People’ campaign of 1874. Long before the People’s Will murdered Alexander II, before even Marx ad been translated into Russian, the Narodniks, or Populists were active in trying to bring about revolutionary change in Russia. These were the middle class intelligentsia (a Russian term coined specifically for the disaffected and alienated educated of late Czarist Russia) who had effectively been excluded from participation in the Czarist system. Universities had fallen under the repression of Dmitri Tolstoy, and the bourgeoisie that had begun to grow in Russia were largely excluded from the administration of the country, even though they were by far the best equipped and educated to help Russia advance. Instead incompetence, nepotism and corruption

ruled, the aristocracy were unyielding in their domination of the civil service, army and other elite professions. One of Lenin’s arguments in favour of not waiting for a revolution to happen in its own time or allowing gradual and progressive change to take place in Russia was that eventually the Czarist state would realise its mistake and stop marginalising its most talented and intelligent citizens. The revolutionary underground counted on these many ambitious and angry men and women to fill its ranks, and Lenin feared they cold just as easily be found prestigious roles supporting the status quo. Fortunately for him, as we have observed, the Czarist State lacked the ability and the inclination to be so forward looking. The peasants, newly freed from serfdom, had been left in many cases in an appalling state of financial destitution, having been granted poor quality land which they had to be saddled in debt to afford. Many hoped that the emancipation was a cruel joke perpetrated on them not by the good father Czar but by the landowners who had tricked him. They clung on to the idea that a ‘Golden Manifesto’ would be revealed by the Czar; the real edict of emancipation. Peasant unrest and riots exploded after the disappointment of the emancipation, and the intelligentsia by the 1870s knew that their time had come. These educated and often quite Westernised European Russians still hoped, as their masters in the aristocracy did, that and industrial revolution and the capitalist world it brought with it could be avoided. Whilst the aristocracy wished to remain mired in feudalism, the new intelligentsia hoped that a quick transition to a socialist society based on the peasant commune could be achieved. In many ways the Narodniks were Slavophiles too, they looked upon the peasant commune as being one of Russia’s greatest assets, a fair, democratic and egalitarian sharing of resources, just as Nicholas II would eventually do, they romanticised peasant life. This would prove not only their downfall, but the downfall of an entire ideal, because in 1874 they decided en masse to infiltrate themselves into peasant villages across Russia in order to experience peasant life and work, and also to preach revolution.

What they found in peasant Russia was a shock, the patriarchal villages were frequently drunken and violent, with women being treated like chattels and frequently on the receiving end of public displays of brutality. When the issue of the peasant’s oppression was raised, the intelligentsia realised they were quite literally speaking a different language to the peasants, and lack of education was only part of the issue. The peasants were often not aware of the wider world around them, they had never left their immediate district, to them the Czar was a distant and almost mythical figure, someone who never manifested himself in their lives except in the form of a hated tax collector. They thought the idea of rebelling against the Czar was absurd, they had far more sympathy with burning down a manor house or two, because the thing they were solely interested in, more than any political discussion, was land. The peasants thought solely about acquiring land and were disinterested in, or incapable of seeing, any bigger picture than that. They often betrayed their guests to the Czar’s secret police, and were rewarded with money and vodka for their troubles, the impressionable young revolutionaries were arrested, beaten, sometimes tortured and sent into exile. Revolutionary activist Praskovia Ivanovskaia recorded the hopelessness of the cause in her memoirs: “On our first day, we joined the other women workers in some pretty filthy work: shearing sheep. We performed this monotonous task in a large covered shed, saturated with the smell of sheep. Some of us sheared, while others picked burrs and all sorts of trash that had gotten caught in the wool. We were soon transferred from the foul shed to a distant work site in the broad steppe, the realm of green fields. We were assigned to hay mowing.

At four in the morning, as the sun’s rays were just beginning to spill over the steppe, the overseer would wake us, kicking the legs of those who wouldn’t get up immediately. At the camp, the steward assigned us to the various sectors. In the morning, we froze from the bitterly cold dew, which drenched our clothing up to the waist. Staggering along, still half asleep, we worked as automatically as robots, gradually warming up a bit. At ten, we returned to camp for breakfast, which lasted around half an hour. Despite the camp hubbub, some people preferred to nap instead of eating. Our food was of rather poor quality - very plain and unappetizing. In the morning, they cooked us a watery gruel made from wheat and water with a dose of salt, or buckwheat dumplings as big as cobblestones - one or two of these would satisfy the hunger of even the greatest glutton. The meal was poured into a wooden trough, from which you’d pull the dumplings with long, pointed splinters. We got the same modest fare for lunch and dinner. After our brief breakfast, we returned to work. As the day wore on, the heat became so intense that you wanted to take shelter in any available patch of shade. The sun was so strong that the backs of most of the newly arrived vagabonds were practically covered with swollen blisters; later, as their skin toughened up, the burns went away. We women were often so exhausted from the heat that we lost much of our modesty: when we reaped and bound the hay, we wore only our shirts, since that made it a lot easier to work. During the busy season, there were no set limits to the work day: if the steward wished, it could last for sixteen hours or more, with only an hour off for lunch. Actually, the work itself was lively and gay, although Galina and I found it difficult and alien. In the evening, after the sun had set, we returned to camp. The fire would be going and dinner waiting. Some people filled their stomachs with the plain, unsatisfying food and fell asleep on the

spot, scattered around camp. Everyone slept under the open sky, harassed by mosquitoes and subject to the bites of other enemies as well: the black spiders, whose venom could make your whole body swell up. At first, people found it rather strange to hear ordinary girls - manual labourers like themselves - speak of many things they’d never heard or even thought about. They became most interested when the conversation touched upon the land: this immensely important topic was dear to every heart. Everyone was united on this issue; they all felt the need for land most acutely, and this provided us a way to reach even the simplest peasant. However, we didn’t actually conduct socialist propaganda; it was clear that we were still an alien, incomprehensible element in a world we scarcely knew. Of course, our difficulties were compounded by the repressive political system of Russia and the peasants’ own fear. They reacted to all radical talk with caution, distrust, and sometimes the most natural incomprehension. Frequently our evening talks ended with the peasants saying: “That’s our fate - so it’s been written”, or, “We’re born - we’ll die.” In fact, we were rarely able to talk at all: after the day’s work, our limbs shrieked with weariness, our exhausted bodies demanded rest and peace.” In 1876 one of the offshoots of this campaign, a group called Land and Liberty, formed itself in St Petersburg, it advocated an abolition of the Russian Empire and two thirds of the land to be given to the peasants. They joined the wider Narodniks campaign and when this failed, half of the group formed Narodnaya Volya, the group who would later murder the Czar. The populist movement seemed to be splintering in two directions, those who advocated open revolt,

leading the people (however disinterested they might seem) and those who advocated a programme of terrorism and assassinations. The father of revolutionary thought in Europe for much of the 19th Century was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and in his manifesto ‘The Catechism of a Revolutionary’ with the fraudulent revolutionary Nechayev, he said: “The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.” With these words he was predicting the future of the revolutionary movement in Russia, and it would be the young men and women who later ‘sever every link with the social order’, who would emerge as the dominant voices in the underground. in 1877 the Narodniks led a predictably disastrous uprising against the Czar, with limited peasant support, poor coordination and insufficient arms or logistics, it was easily crushed and with it the dreams of a a broad based peasant revolution in Russia. The remaining Narodniks who refused to resort to terrorism gravitated towards Georgi Plekhanov, the man credited with bringing Marxism to Russia. Like many other revolutionaries, he left Russia for Switzerland to escape the attention of the Okhrana in 1880, and in his absence his more radical brethren in the Narodnaya Volya killed Alexander II in 1881. Pavel Axelrod, the revolutionary who had first enticed Plekhanov to Land and Liberty described him thus: ““He spoke well in a business-like fashion, simply and yet in a literary way. One perceived in him a love for knowledge, a habit of reading, thinking, working. He dreamed at the time of going abroad to complete his training in chemistry. This plan didn’t please me... This is a luxury! I said

to the young man. If you take so long to complete your studies in chemistry, when will you begin to work for the revolution?” As Plekhanov came to develop a deeper understanding of Marxism, and perhaps because of the bitter failure of initiatives to radicalise the peasantry, he focused his thoughts on the revolutionary potential of Russia’s industrial working class. He established the Emancipation of Labour group whilst in exile and among others it attracted Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov (about whom, more later), and became fierce in its criticism of the Narodniks. Through the prism of Marxist dialectic or theory, the Narodniks had made an amateurish mistake. They had supposed that it was possible to skip the capitalist phase of development altogether and to go from feudalism directly to socialism. As far as Plekhanov and his fellow travellers were concerned, Marx’s theories were an almost scientific understanding of history’s immutable laws, and by trying to short circuit them, the seeds of the Narodniks downfall had been sown. A capitalist phase must be allowed to happen, because then an industrial working class could form, experience first hand the iniquitous nature of capitalism, become educated, organised and overthrow their bosses. From this embryonic beginning in the Swiss Alps, the Russian Social Democratic Party would be born, and it in turn would subdivide and create the Bolshevik and Menshevik Parties. This schism would result from the arguments put forward by Vladimir Ilych Lenin.

Lenin’s Journey Contrary to most Soviet era biographies of Lenin, which portray him as a time served member of Russia’s working classes, Vladimir Ulyanov was anything but. He was the son of a well to do provincial inspector of schools from Simbirsk, in the East of Central Russia, he had trained as a lawyer but scarcely even practiced in that profession either. Various mythologised narratives have him defending workers from the Czar’s oppressive courts, whereas it is doubtful that he spoke to anyone from Russia’s working classes in anything other than a master servant capacity before 1917. Lenin was for much of his life supported by his mother, who drew off a large pension left by her late husband Ilya, who died in 1886. His father had been raised to the status of minor nobility for his work and he was a bastion of the establishment and a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. He had brought his children up with an unshakable belief that they were important parts of the middle class civil society that was forging itself at the end of the 19th Century, and it was the educated and driven who would change the world. The exclusion of the entire Ulyanov family from the civil society occurred in 1887 when Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir’s elder brother tried to complete what Narodnaya Volya had begun and was part of a conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. He was hanged after doggedly refusing to denounce his co conspirators, and another of the Ulyanov children, Anna, was exiled to Kokushkino, the Ulyanov country estate near Kazan. Some historians point to the death of Alexander Ulyanov as the reason for Lenin’s journey towards political radicalism, but the truth is that he was already engrossed in Marx, Hegel and reading revolutionary novels by Alexander Herzen long before Alexander’s death. He was symptomatic of a generation of very able, very well educated young men who knew that despite all their abilities

there would be no role for them in shaping the future of Russia. Many of them, the Ulyanovs included, thought and acted like Europeans, they read Rousseau and Voltaire (Lenin was obsessed with the Jacobin revolutionaries during the French Revolution and thought that their fate was a lesson for the Bolsheviks), Dickens and Goethe, and uppermost in the minds of this whole generation was the question of how to move Russia forward, how would the great modernisation be brought about? Lenin was a man with an instinct for the possibilities that modernisation could bring and indeed put a great deal of this modernity into practice in the final years of his life. By 1893 He was a professional revolutionary activist and writer, living in St Petersburg and under almost constant surveillance from the Okhrana, and he spent several years in exile at the end of the 1890s in eastern Siberia, meeting among others Georgi Plekhanov. It was in 1899 that he wrote in exile and published The Development of Capitalism in Russia, where he used statistical evidence to show that the phase of development the populists were anxious to avoid, that of capitalism, was upon them whether they liked it or not. He also tried to show that rural capitalism, the entrepreneurial spirit of wealthier ‘Kulak’ farmers (Kulak is Russian for fist, suggesting ‘tight fistedness’, whereas their new prosperity probably had more to do with farming effectively and drinking less) was destroying the collective farm of the Obschina anyway. Lenin left Russia at the end of his exile in 1900, living on London, Paris and Geneva, but it was at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party that he created a fateful schism within the movement, one which would eventually cast a long shadow over the 20th Century. Between the autumn of 1901 and February 1902 Lenin wrote the most influential manifesto of his career, titled ‘What is to be done?’, the title was taken from the revolutionary novel by Chernyshevsky, which had apparently inspired Lenin during his formative years. The manifesto in its opening pages recognized that a schism existed between moderate social democratic forces on the left and

more radical voices (of which Lenin was one) demanding swifter change. He said: “The conflict between these trends now flares up in a bright flame and now dies down and smoulders under the ashes of imposing “truce resolutions”.” Ultimately Lenin believed these ‘truces’ were unworkable and that one argument must prevail. Lenin argued against the orthodox Marxist approach, which would be to allow capitalist society to develop and flourish and create a vast working class; he believed that whilst the Narodniks were wrong in trying to bypass capitalism altogether, that the more moderate voices on the left were going too far in the opposite direction, by simply waiting for history (as predicted by Marx) to take its course. For Lenin, there was a historical window of opportunity, one that would not remain open forever. If capitalism became established in Russia, if progressive economic, social and political change happened, then a middle class would become too embedded in the systems of power and revolution would be impossible. All the bright and enthusiastic intelligentsia of his generation would be co-opted into a new Russian bourgeois society. Lenin argued that a new interpretation of Marxism was necessary, and this required a historical short cut. Instead of waiting for the revolution to come from an entire social class, a small and dedicated professional band of revolutionaries must be formed, well versed in Marxist theory, who would seize power on behalf of a largely unradicalised, uneducated working class. Once they did this, they would educate the people in socialism, quite the reverse of waiting for the people to educate themselves and waiting for them to bring about change. The ambiguity of the idea of ‘educating the people in socialism’ would haunt Russia for a century. Stalin’s Gulags would be the school rooms of this new education, as scientists, composers, bankers and Czarist army officers learned how to become good soviet workers. Lenin further argued that this new revolutionary vanguard must exist in exile; it was not feasible for them to stay in Russia, given the

degree of surveillance they were subjected to by the Okhrana. The group must be kept deliberately small, so as to keep out infiltrators and those who were less than committed (Lenin was always very impressed by those who worked hard, got their hands dirty for the cause and those who had been imprisoned or had suffered, this is why Stalin initially appealed to him). The book led to a split of the Russian Social Democratic Party into a minority (Menshevik) and a majority (Bolshevik) group, with the Bolshevik faction now congregating around Lenin as their de facto leader. The route to revolution that Lenin had chosen was no more destined to be successful than the more moderate journey of the Mensheviks, which would have most likely manifested itself in gradual progressive change in Russia if it had not been for the folly of the Czar. Nicholas II was committed to preserving the autocracy at any cost, he believed in the sanctity of the Empire’s fundamental laws, which required him to ignore any parliament, council of ministers or advice that did not suit him. It was this folly that led him inexorably to war in 1914 and from there a catastrophe evolved that swept his dynasty away. Following the 1905 revolution, Nicholas grudgingly took Witte’s advice and signed the October Manifesto, creating a limited constitution and a parliament of deputies (Duma). Over the next five years the Czar quickly took back every concession he had made, using Stolypin to redraft the constitution and voting entitlement, stocking the Duma not with socialists but with nationalist and conservative deputies. It was these men who demanded war in 1914 after a series of humiliations by Germany over the Balkans and these men who may well have swept the Czar from power themselves had they not had their national patriotic struggle. The Czar hoped for a limited mobilization against Austria in the summer of 1914 but was told by his generals it was impossible, he

frantically wrote to the Kaiser of Germany, his cousin, to try to avert catastrophe but to no avail. Russia would be no match for Germany, even though she had far superior numbers. She had failed to learn the lessons that other powers had about modernization and warfare throughout the 19th Century. The Russian army did not encrypt their signals traffic, German cryptanalysts were incredulous when they found themselves listening to uncoded messages and at first thought it must be a trick. There was little in the way of field hospitals, logistics and in response to the criticism that the army had failed to dig any trenches for the men to protect them from enemy shells, it was the opinion of General Samsonov that all soldiers would have to do when the whistle of incoming artillery could be heard, would be to lie down. It was the Russian local government, the Zemstva who came to the rescue. Prince Georgi Lvov, later to be the first Prime Minister of Russia in 1917, he and the national organizing body of the Zemstva, the Zemgor, arranged for field hospitals, boots, winter clothes, food, and other essentials to make it to the front line. Thousands of volunteers built trench systems, camps and depots for equipment, but even with this herculean effort, there was still no saving the war effort. The army demanded that all food shipments be sent to the front first and foremost, but due to the poorly organized railway system and the inability of anyone to track the whereabouts or the destination of foodstuffs, much of it was left to rot in railway sheds. Most disastrously of all was the absence of any modern professionalism amongst the generals. The only real talent of the war, General Alexei Brusilov, led a re-equipped and reinvigorated Russian Army in 1916 to initial success and global acclaim with the Carpathian Offensive against Austria, that dealt her a series of catastrophic blows. The failure of rival generals Evert and Kuropatkin eventually undermined his efforts, they sabotaged him in no small part due to envy and a fear of losing the Czar’s favour.

The commander in chief himself, the Czar, who took over from his uncle the Grand Duke Nikolai in 1915 lived in a dreamworld. The Czar spent much of his war at the Stavka (forward command) at Mogilev in Belorussia, enjoying long walks, games of chess, balls and engaging with the war in the most superficial way, intervening with next to no knowledge periodically and making poor decisions. It was the opinion of his generals in 1917 that some kind of coup to remove him would be preferable, so at least then they might stand some chance of winning the war. The removal of the Czar took all parties by surprise, not least the Bolsheviks. Six weeks before the fall of the Romanov dynasty amid scenes of mass dissent in St Petersburg, Lenin had been lecturing to younger revolutionaries in Switzerland that change would most likely not happen in his lifetime. It was to the younger generation that people such as he must now look, he told them, not knowing that in little more than a month his role in shaping the destiny of Russia and the rest of the world in the 20th Century would come.

The lessons of the Civil War. The Provisional Government that took over from the collapsed Czarist regime never really stood much of a chance of survival. It lacked any kind of mandate for power and most members had agreed that they had no right to institute any major changes, that these must be brought about by an elected government. The Provisional Government was a self appointed body of ministers that existed in both competition and cooperation with the new workers representative body, the Petrograd (The new name of St Petersburg from 1914 onwards) Soviet. The Soviet was an assembly of deputies from the various workers and soldiers Soviets (councils or committees) from across the city, and whilst the proceedings at the Soviet were chaotic, noisy and virtually guaranteed to achieve the bare minimum, the deputies held the trump card over the Provisional Government. They controlled the army. The first act of the delegates at the Soviet was to pass Soviet Order No 1, which stated that any law the Provisional Government passed would only be workable with their cooperation, and that any time the Soviet viewed a law illegitimate, they were entitled to over rule it, using military force if necessary. The fundamental issues that plagued Russia, the war, the chronic food shortages in the cities and the fact that the peasants had seized the opportunity presented to them by the collapse of the Czar’s power and had occupied the lands of the nobility across Russia; none of these were likely to be addressed by the Provisional Government. Prince Lvov was committed to keeping Russia in the war, realising that he had no choice as British and French war loans under wrote much of the Russian economy. Also, there was still a fiercely anti German patriotism evident in Russia, the idea that the sacrifices of so many were simply going to be walked away from was too bitter a pill for many Russians to swallow.

When Lenin returned to Petrograd in April 1917, arriving at the Finland Station, greeted by crowds of supporters and an armoured car, he delivered his ‘April Theses’, supposedly a manifesto for change, but in reality a call for any kind of support the Bolsheviks could get. He offered ‘Peace, Bread, Land and all power to the Soviets,’ throughout the war he had vociferously attacked the European social democrats from England, France and Germany who had supported the war, not because he was in any way a pacifist, but because the war presented an ideal opportunity to start a class war, to encourage the workers to turn their guns on their masters. His offer of bread made sense too, the February Revolution had started because of food shortages in the city, but it was his offer of land that seemed out of character. Lenin had little or no interest in the peasantry, during the 18911892 Volga famine, Lenin, a bystander to the tragedy was critical of the Zemstvos efforts to save the lives of the sick and starving peasantry, arguing that the process of trying to alleviate the suffering was actually preventing the inevitable collapse of the Czarist system, and that all parties should take a step back and allow the disaster to run its course. The lessons learned from the ‘To the People’ campaign were not lost on Lenin, even though he didn’t take part in it, he was still aware of the limited usefulness of the peasantry to his overall designs. They had no revolutionary consciousness (though the extent to which the workers did is debatable), and they were solely interested in land. Lenin wanted to lure them away from the Social Revolutionary Party, a descendent of the Narodniks, who had spent decades building up their support in the peasantry. He had no long term intention of letting them keep the land, his view of modernisation, later to come to fruition under Stalin, was the control of the land by the state. The new socialist order that would emerge would see all privately owned land collectivised and resources pooled, the peasant class would no longer be working for its own ends but for the greater

good, they were to become an agrarian proletariat, workers in the fields, educated in socialism. The Provisional Government didn’t fall, in so much as it simply withered away. During the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks planned and executed a coup (timing it before there could be democratic elections in November) they didn’t storm the winter palace as Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein would have us believe, they wandered in because there were virtually no defenders. Once ensconced in power, defended by loyal army units, a Red Guard militia of workers and soldiers and the sailors from the nearby Kronstadt base, the Bolsheviks proceeded to disregard the results of the November elections that placed the SR Party as the overall majority party in Russia. The establishment of a secret police, the Cheka, under the control of the former Polish aristocrat and Bolshevik Felix Dzerzinsky (a man who was knowledgeable with torture on an intimate level and meted out on his enemies many exotic and horrific punishments his own body was supposedly criss-crossed with the Okhrana’s scars) gave a further clue to their opponents the direction that the new government was taking. In December 1917 Lenin said: “No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!” The Cheka was established, according to Lenin, to bring about a ‘revolutionary settling of accounts.’ The final development that made civil war an inevitability was the decision by the Bolsheviks to sue for peace at any price. Lenin sent Leon Trotsky, a recent convert to the Bolshevik Party from the Mensheviks to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany at Brest Litovsk. At first his tactics seemed confusing to the Germans, Lenin certainly didn’t want Trotsky to capitulate and give in to Germany’s

enormous demands, but the reality of the situation was that the Russian Army had all but collapsed, it was experiencing mass desertion as peasant soldiers hear all about the land grab going on back home and were anxious to get hold of some of land themselves. Trotsky was sent to play for time, the negotiations began in December 1917 and in his memoir My Life, Trotsky recalls it thus: “It was obvious that going on with the war was impossible. On this point there was not even a shadow of disagreement between Lenin and me. But there was another question. How had the February revolution, and, later on, the October revolution, affected the German army? How soon would any effect show itself? To these questions no answer could as yet be given. We had to try and find it in the course of the negotiations as long as we could. It was necessary to give the European workers time to absorb properly the very fact of the Soviet revolution.” In this passage lies a clue to the Bolshevik’s real game, and if we understand this strategy it turns the story of the Russian Revolution on its head, making it really the story of a failed German Revolution. Lenin knew Russia was too backward to ever become a modern industrialised socialist state on it’s own, Russia was meant simply to be the starting point, the trigger for a worldwide revolution, starting with Germany. Germany, Marx had thought, would be the real home of revolution, it was industrialised enough, had big enough working class parties and trade unions and the right level of technological know how to create a socialist society. If the flames of revolution could be allowed to spread to Germany, then German workers could eventually help their Russian brethren to industrialise. As Trotsky desperately tried to stall the German party, both he and Lenin pinned all their hopes for the future on the workers of German. The German and Austrian negotiators were wise to their scheme however, as the account of Count Ottokar Czernin of Austria reveals: “The leader of the Russian delegation is a Jew, named Joffe, who has recently been released from Siberia... after the meal I had a first conversation with Mr. Joffe. His whole theory is simply based on the universal application of the right of

self-governance of nations in the broadest form. The thus liberated nations then have to be brought to love each other... I advised him that we would not attempt to imitate the Russian example and that we likewise would not tolerate a meddling in our internal affairs. If he continued to hold on his utopic viewpoints the peace would not be possible and then he would be well advised just to take the journey back with the next train. Mr. Joffe looked astonishedly at me and was silent for a while. Then he continued in a tone I shall never forget: “I very much hope that we will be able to raise the revolution also in your country.” The Joffe that Czernin refers to is Adolphe Joffe, the leader of the delegation, but ultimately answerable to Trotsky. It was clear from Joffe’s astonishment that the Russian delegation had been outmatched by the Austro-German team, and eventually the Alliance Powers called time of the Bolsheviks. The unrealistic Bolshevik demands for peace, based on no forced annexations of Russian land, no indemnities and freedom of determination for all national groups facing foreign occupation were dismissed by the Germans, who were out of patience and knew the a Russians couldn’t fight for any of their claims. By late February 1918 Trotsky knew he was out of options, the Germans were getting ready to march on Petrograd, and if they got there, the revolution would be extinguished. He wrote in his autobiography : “ On 21st February, we received new terms from Germany, framed, apparently, with the direct object of making the signing of peace impossible. By the time our delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk, these terms, as is well known, had been made even harsher. All of us, including Lenin, were of the impression that the Germans had come to an agreement with the Allies about crushing the Soviets, and that a peace on the western front was to be built on the bones of the Russian revolution.“ On 3rd March our delegation signed the peace treaty without even reading it. Forestalling many of the ideas of Clemenceau, the BrestLitovsk peace was like the hangman’s noose. On 22nd March the

treaty was ratified by the German Reichstag. The German Social Democrats gave their approval in advance to the future principles of Versailles.” With this signature, all hope of spreading the revolution to Germany was gone, the fact that Germany’s biggest socialist party ratified the treaty was telling. In an appalling miscalculation the Bolsheviks had trapped their revolution within the one country that could never sustain it, and the only chance to industrialise Russia through vaguely civilised means was gone, leaving the door open in the future for far less civilised methods. The signing of the Treaty Of Brest Litovsk gave rise in Russia to an explosion in anger, but as the German war diarist Hubert Sulzbach points out, the Russians were in an impossible situation. He wrote: “The final peace treaty has been signed with Russia. Our conditions are hard and severe, but our quite exceptional victories entitle us to demand these, since our troops are nearly in Petersburg, and further over on the southern front, Kiev has been occupied, while in the last week we have captured the following men and items of equipment: 6,800 officers, 54,000 men, 2,400 guns, 5,000 machine-guns, 8,000 railway trucks, 8,000 locomotives, 128,000 rifles and 2 million rounds of artillery ammunition. Yes, there is still some justice left, and the state which was first to start mass murder in 1914 has now, with all its missions, been finally overthrown.” Lenin and Trotsky had other issues to contend with, the emergence of at least five anti Bolshevik armies in 1918, and the intervention of Britain, France, The USA and Japan, supplying the counter revolutionaries and actually landing troops on Russian soil changed dramatically the priorities of the new rulers of Russia. Lenin had been expecting a counter revolution and welcomed it, it was precisely the opportunity he sought to destroy class enemies. He was rather more taken by surprise by the SR would be assassin Dora Kaplan who on the 30th August 1918 shot him several times,

nearly killing him. The attempt on his life was part of a wider campaign of SR terror, the SR Party were the most experienced in bombings and shootings, having carried out the lions share of them in 1905. The Cheka took the opportunity presented to them by the shooting to initiate the Red Terror, a wide ranging purge of supposed bourgeois class enemies of the workers and political opponents of the regime. During her fleeting ‘trial’, before her execution Dora Kaplan said: “My name is Fanya (as she was also known) Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kyiv. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.” In much the same way (principally because Lenin had modelled in thus) as the Jacobins in the French Revolution sent perceived enemies of the revolution to the guillotine whilst the armies of Austria and Russia advanced on Paris, the Bolsheviks went on a murderous rampage against Russia’s middle classes. If the French revolutionary terror was in some part an organic reaction to external circumstances, the Bolshevik terror could in no way be thought of as the same thing. It might have been triggered by Lenin’s shooting, but it had been planned long before the revolution, in his years in exile, Lenin had horrified many other revolutionaries with the degree of violence that he was prepared to use in order to reshape Russian society. Lenin’s realisation that no further revolutionary successes abroad would be possible led him to a series of conclusions about the degree of Soviet democracy that would be permissible, and to a wholly new attitude towards the peasants. Alongside the Red Terror, a new policy of War Communism was instituted, which was a bid to use

violent authoritarian centralised control and requisitions in order to win the civil war. The early confrontations between the newly formed Red Army, soon to come under the command of Leon Trotsky, and the White Armies were little more than inconclusive skirmishes, but quickly the scope and ferocity of the war escalated, the war itself reaching depths in internecine savagery never before seen in Russia. In total the Russian Civil War claimed more lives than the First World War, and many of those deaths were as a result of Lenin’s policies and the famine they caused. Peasants were now subject to grain requisition. Using a particularly savage and perverse interpretation of class politics as a cover for the expropriation, peasants found hoarding grain (or stockpiling it for winter, as peasants for a millennia have done) were thought to be bourgeois capitalist speculators and were often summarily executed. This had the added advantage to Lenin of fuelling resentments and animosities within villages, the less successful peasants were able to denounce their more successful neighbours and following their deaths or imprisonment loot their tools. The food was collected by detachments of the Cheka, supposedly on the hunt for class enemies, but it would be wide of the Mark to describe any of the peasants as middle class, capitalist or any of the other labels the Bolsheviks hung on them. Quite simply the peasants with any grain reserves were those who were good at farming and mildly more prudent than their neighbours. Taking grain or livestock from a village often condemned the community to death, as the Bolsheviks also took the village’s seed grain, ensuring barren fields the following year. The Bolsheviks took horses and by 1920 had conscripted over five million young men to fight in the new Red Army. The impact on peasant Russia was catastrophic. American journalist Ernest Poole recorded in his travels in Russia the resulting shortages and inflation on the peasants, being told by one of them: “Of course, our progress has been blocked by the war and the revolution. Goods have gone up to ruinous rates. Already we are nearly out of horseshoes, axes, harrows, ploughs. Last spring we had not ploughs enough to do the

needed ploughing, and that is why our crop is short. There is not enough rye in the district to take us through the winter, let alone to feed the towns. And so the town people will starve for awhile and sooner or later, I suppose, they will finish with their wrangling, start their mills and factories, and turn out the ploughs and tools we need.” Similarly the impact on the cities was disastrous too. Virtually all private trade was banned, the sole legitimate source of any resources at all was the state, and centuries of trade between country and town that had organically evolved in a complex network of middlemen and markets was abolished overnight on pain of death. By 1921 a widespread famine across Russia was also affecting Russia’s cities, the small black Market that survived was perhaps the only way of supplementing the meagre rations that were dispensed by the new Bolshevik state (a state, which it’s worth mentioning, was barely functioning at all beyond fighting internal and external enemies). The conditions for workers were equally bleak, the Soviets in the factories were banned ad all workplace democracy was eliminated, in the factories where it was applied, it led to nothing short of chaos. Harsh martial law was applied to factories with brutal summary justice being applied by the Cheka for lateness, absenteeism and breakages (sabotage), making the workers prisoners on the shop floor; the regime that was inflicted upon them in order to win the civil war made the cruelties and ignorance of the Czarist era look comparatively benign. By 1920 the first of the camps had also been created, though at this point the Sovoletsky Islands were less about creating a colony of forced labour in the arctic circle as finding a place to send enemies of the regime. Former Czarists, SRs, Mensheviks, Priests and unlucky foreigners caught up in the events of the civil war were sent to the islands; it would not be until the mid 1920s that the Gulag system would become a major force in Soviet policy. A combination of three crises in 1921, the revolt against the Bolsheviks of their most loyal troops, the Kronstadt sailors (it had been the sailors on the battleship Aurora who had sailed up the River

Neva in October 1917, firing their guns next to the Winter Palace, who had convinced the minister of the Provisional Government that all was lost), a peasant uprising and internal dissent within the Bolshevik (now Communist Party) convinced Lenin that a radical change of course was necessary. The war had been not so much won by the Bolsheviks but lost by their enemies, a disparate and uneasy alliance of old Czarist army officers, radical nationalists, separatist Ukrainians and Baltic States and the Socialist Revolutionaries. The main failing of these so called ‘White’ armies was a failure of imagination, they and no alternative programme to the Bolsheviks, no alternative to the ‘more of the same’ that the peasants suspected and dreaded. The peasants sought legitimacy for their requisitioning of landowners estates, they had grabbed the land but still felt deeply unsecured on it, fearing a new government might give it back to their former masters. A government made up of country squires was far more likely to do such a thing ( though it was uppermost in Lenin’s mind to nationalise all the land as soon as he was able to do so anyway). The Bolsheviks promised land to the peasants and seemed to be at least willing to fight off the foreign backed forces, whereas the Whites simply said nothing at all and treated the peasants with their normal degree of violence and contempt. Without peasant support it was simply impossible to win the civil war, and whilst the peasants quickly came to hate the Bolsheviks, they held out for the possibility of land, with the Whites, there was an equivalent degree of hatred and no indication that any land might be forthcoming. War Communism had brought Russia to its knees, Trotsky observed that ‘we had won the civil war but destroyed the country in order to do so’, and the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, one which he brutally suppressed, was a powerful indicator to Lenin that compromises must be made. Across peasant Russia an ongoing rebellion, in the end only put down by planes and poison gas and the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of men had Lenin seriously worried, he feared that the

peasants posed more of a danger to the Bolshevik regime than the White Armies had. Here is how the Prague based emigre paper Volia Rossii reported the uprising: “Rebellious sentiment has been smoldering for a long time in the Tambov plains, having been engendered almost simultaneously with the coming into power of the Soviet rule. From time to time this sentiment breaks into open flame, and then the bells of the villages are tolling ominously across the fields, multitudes of insurgent peasants are gathering, railroad tracks arc taken apart, the hateful ‘Commissars’ disappear from the villages, and not a trace remains of the Communist ‘nuclei.’ This is followed by the arrival of troops, and then savage vengeance is meted out to the rebels. The so-called ‘Peasants’ Government of the Bolsheviks makes cruel reprisals on the peasants, extirpating by fire and sword the very thought or a genuine peasant government, stifling their exasperation, the peasant- once more harness themselves to the Bolshevik yoke and watch silently the Bolshevik officials returning to the villages and making themselves comfortable on the ‘broad backs of the peasantry. Then again there comes an end to the patience of the Tambov peasants, and again the village bells are heard tolling across the plains. This story has been repeating itself every year since 1918. And only the village cemetery knows how many gray and blond heads the Tambov peasants have laid down in their struggle for freedom. In the Fall of 1920 the Tambov peasantry once more revolted and attacked the Soviet authorities with clubs and pitchforks. Ever since there has been a state of open rebellion; and, now subsiding, now flaring tip again in full force, the struggle has been going on continuously, being carried on by partisan detachments scattered broadcast and disappearing from view entirely if too greatly outnumbered.

In common with other revolutionary organizations, the Party or Socialist Revolutionaries organized in the Spring of 1920 the ‘Tambov Peasants’ Union’ which succeeded within a brief period in covering the entire Tambov district with a network of branches. The Union had not yet fully succeeded in organizing the whole peasantry when, quite unexpectedly for its leaders, a spontaneous peasant insurrection broke out in the south of the Tambov district. This movement started on the 12th of August in the village of Kamenka at the very moment when a well attended district convention of the peasantry was being held at a place about 10 miles distant from the city of Tambov. The occasion for that particular uprising among the peasants of Kamenka was furnished by the arrival of a requisitioning detachment which began to collect additional levies of grain. Seven members or the detachment were killed by the peasants, and the village then realized that it would not escape Bolshevik retaliation. Thereupon a peasant ‘Staff’ was hastily organized, trenches were dug, and the villages, prepared under the leadership of the local branch of the Peasant Union to repel the punitive expedition of the Bolsheviks. The latter was not slow in making its appearance. Soon there appeared 20 cavalrymen from the direction or the Sampur railroad station. A brief fusillade of shots was exchanged. as a result of which the punitive expedition was beaten and fled. This first expedition was followed by a second and third one, with increasing numbers of soldiers, but these, too, were routed by the peasants.” At the same time that Lenin’s health was failing him, he was also dealing with internal party disunity, and perhaps inadvertently created one of the cornerstones of Stalinism in a bid to shore up his own position as the chief architect of Soviet Policy. Lenin banned factionalism within the now Communist Party (the term Bolshevik was deemed to have no further relevance with the Mensheviks either exiled or imprisoned or dead). At the tenth party conference in 1921 he attacked those who’s ideas led to splits

and divisions in party unity principally those who were loosely identified as the Workers Opposition, led by the independently minded Alexandra Kollontai. In a letter to Grigori Zinoviev, Lenin revealed his thoughts, he wrote: “”All members of the Russian Communist Party who are in the slightest degree suspicious or unreliable ... should be got rid of...” The penalties for dissent at this point were expulsion from the party, though within five years expulsion brought with it many additional dangers. In a country shattered by war, party membership was the only reliable method of accessing good housing, food and medical care, and expulsion could mean destitution. The plush Granovsky building and the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, now the seat of government (a civil war measure) were homes to high ranking party officials, generals and secret policemen, who lived a lifestyle that was far removed from the experience of the majority of Russians; the corrupting of the new Soviet state had begun and there was a lot to lose from being expelled. Lenin’s bid to deal with the epic economic crises that Russia faced, which were morphing into almost insurmountable challenges to Communist rule was a reversion to a mixed economy with a degree of capitalist entrepreneurship sanctioned that horrified the left of the Communist Party. The New Economic Policy has divided historians for much of the last hundred years, was it Lenin’s temporary tactical withdrawal from his fundamentalist anti capitalist stance, or an acceptance that most if not all of his ideological positions prior to taking power were unworkable? Lenin and Trotsky both believed that it was largely unnecessary to have concrete plans when taking power, because after making ‘a few decrees’ as Trotsky put it, the state would whither away, leaving small locally organised democratic collectives of workers and peasants who would manage their own affairs. One can marvel now at this breath taking naivety, but it should not be overlooked that they were perfectly sincere in their views; the fact that policy reversed itself to such an extent during the years of the NEP is an indicator

that veery little was actually set in stone when they came to power. Within four years of the October revolution a supremely powerful and centralised and undemocratic super state was emerging, and previously utopian and libertarian ideas were conveniently dropped, the prevailing orthodoxy (which again helped to shape Stalin’s era) was that far from utopia being possible in the absence of the state, one it would only be possible through the state. The NEP as it affected the peasants was summarised in a state decree that read: “In order to assure an efficient and stable economic life on the basis of a freer disposition by the farmer of the products of his labor and of his economic resources, in order to strengthen the peasant economy and raise its productivity and also in order to calculate precisely the obligation to the state which falls on the peasants, requisitioning, as a means of state collection of food supplies, raw material and fodder, is to be replaced by a tax in kind....” This time, however, there was actually something in it for the peasants: “Those farmers who wish to deliver to the state the surplus in their possession after the tax has been paid must receive, in exchange for the voluntary delivery of this surplus, objects of general consumption and agricultural machinery. With this end in view, a steady state reserve fund of agricultural machinery and objects of general consumption is being created. It includes both domestic products and goods purchased abroad. Part of the state gold reserve and part of the ready raw materials are set aside for the purpose of making purchases abroad.” It wasn’t just the peasants who were given some breathing space from the rigours of War Communism, small businesses were allowed to thrive again, a separate decree announced that the state was willing: “To permit all citizens, whose rights are not limited by law established, upon the territory of the RSFSR and her Allies and the

Soviet Republics united with her by treaty, the right of organizing industrial and commercial undertakings and of pursuing trades and professions permitted by the laws of the RSFSR, provided that all regulations regarding industry and trade and the protection of labor are observed.” Heavy industry, banks, railways and other aspects of ‘monopoly capital’ were retained by the state, but small private industry and trade was outside state control. Two archetypes of this new capitalism emerged over the next few years, figures that Stalin would later persecute mercilessly, largely with the backing of disgruntled, jealous and resentful workers and peasants. In the towns and cities, the NEP men, traders who brought peasant produce to the city and sold it on the open market became a byword for decadence and anti revolutionary sentiment. The middle classes and upper classes who had been destined by the revolution parted with their furs, their Rolls Royces and champagne and other trappings of wealth to the newly wealthy NEP men. The popular image of this class of entrepreneur was part market trader part gangster, surrounded by prostitutes and cash drawn from honest hungry workers. The reality was that without the markets the supplied, many of Russia’s cities would have emptied (and indeed were doing so prior to 1921). The other fateful figure of the NEP was the wealthy farmer, the Kulak who, for the first time was actually benefitting from greater land ownership. Across Russia, Communist Party activists who disagreed with the NEP pointed to the fact that as wealthy peasants emerged class differences within the previously egalitarian peasant communes were growing, rich peasants were hiring poor ones to work on their land. Stalin would eagerly exploit these class divisions later on, decimating the Kulaks (many of whom were in no way wealthy) and turning their envious neighbours against them. Many on the left demanded to know why they had even bothered to fight the civil war in the first place, if Capitalism was allowed to reassert itself.

Revolutionary and dissident Bolshevik Victor Serge wrote many years later that: “The New Economic Policy was, in the space of a few months, already giving marvellous results. From one week to the next, the famine and the speculation were diminishing perceptibly. Restaurants were opening again and, wonder of wonders, pastries which were actually edible were on sale as a rouble apiece. The public was beginning to recover its breath, and people were apt to talk about the return of capitalism, which was synonymous with prosperity. On the other hand, the confusion among the party rank-and-file was staggering. For what did we fight, spill so much blood, agree to so many sacrifices? asked the Civil war veterans bitterly.” Perhaps Lenin’s great failing with the NEP was that he never clarified whether or not it was meant to be a temporary measure, and what, if anything was to replace it. This was the last of the great windows of opportunity he left open for Stalin. From 1922 onwards he was increasingly ill from strokes brought on by the assassination attempt and in 1924 died. In 1922, aware of his failing health and barely able to speak, he appointed Stalin Party General Secretary, a rather unglamorous and low prestige job, but one tryst Stalin could immediately see the benefit in; the job gave him far reaching powers of patronage and appointment across the party, giving him a huge power base to further his own interests from. Trotsky had no such widespread support and when it came to the contest for Lenin’s succession, he was painfully aware of this shortcoming.

The Gulags and the First Five Year Plan. The story of Stalin’s rise to power is perhaps beyond the scope of this ebook, but it is one that I will return to in a later volume. Lenin had left four members of a five man Politburo behind, Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky, and it was Trotsky who was first to be purged. The former three had united against him and by 1929 he had already experienced internal exile and was finally expelled from the USSR. Following the defeat of Trotsky, it was the turn of Zinoviev and Kamenev to be victims of Stalin, who in their arrogance and vanity had presumed was no threat to them. They were expelled from the Communist Party Central Committee in 1928 and following the murder of Kirov in 1934 (about which, more follows) they found themselves on trial for imaginary crimes and conspiracies against the state, none of these purges would have been possible without Lenin’s ban on factions in the party. By the mid to late 1920s Stalin was in secure enough a position to able to impose his views on the future direction of Russia on successive party congresses. he argued for rapid and heavy industrialisation and this found favour with a disgruntled left of the party who were deeply opposed to the NEP. He also argued for a high degree of centralised planning in order to achieve these goals, and he was able to use an ongoing dispute with Trotsky and his supporters that had raged since the civil war on the future direction of Russia. Trotsky had argued that in order to ensure the longevity of the revolution a policy of ‘Permanent Revolution’ was essential, and that meant exporting revolt to Western Europe and beyond. A perfect opportunity arose in 1920 when at the height of the civil war the Newly independent state of Poland, created by the Treaty of

Versailles, invaded the Ukraine, looking to annex rich arable lands that the Poles argued had traditionally belonged to them. The Red Army, under the military command of General Tukachevsky and under the political command of both Stalin and Trotsky chased the Poles all the way to the gates of Warsaw. Had the Red Army been victorious at Warsaw, they wold most likely have marched all the way to Berlin, imposing on the Poles and the Germans the revolution that had taken place in Russia in a different fashion. The Red Army was surrounded and annihilated outside the gates of Warsaw and this epic defeat sealed the fate of the Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution conclusively, from now onwards, Russia would have no choice but to look inwardly in order to solve her problems. Stalin argued that ‘Socialism in One Country’ would be the only way to secure Russia. In a statement to the party in December 1924, following Lenin’s death, he set out his plans, whilst rubbishing his enemies. here is an extract, in which Stalin said: “What do we mean by the possibility of the victory of Socialism in one country? We mean the possibility of solving the contradictions between the proletariat and the peasantry with the aid of the internal forces of our country, the possibility of the proletariat assuming power and using that power to build a complete Socialist society in, our country, with the sympathy and the support of the proletarians of other countries, but without the preliminary victory of the proletarian revolution in other countries. Without such a possibility, the building of Socialism is building without prospects, building without being sure that Socialism will be built. It is no use building Socialism without being sure that we can build it, without being sure that the technical backwardness of our country is not an insuperable obstacle to the building of complete Socialist society. To deny such possibility is to display lack of faith in the cause of building Socialism, to abandon Leninism.

What do we mean by the impossibility of the complete, final victory of Socialism in one country without the victory of the revolution in other countries? We mean the impossibility of having full guarantees against intervention and consequently against the restoration of the bourgeois order, without the victory of the revolution in at least a number of countries. To deny this indisputable thesis is to abandon internationalism, to abandon Leninism. We are living [says Lenin] not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states will be inevitable. That means that if the ruling class, the proletariat, wants to hold sway, it must prove its capacity to do so by military organization also. (Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VIII, p. 33.) We now have before us [says Lenin in another place] an extremely unstable equilibrium, but an unquestionable, an indisputable, a certain equilibrium nevertheless. Will it last long? I cannot tell; nor, I think, can anyone tell. And therefore we must exercise the greatest possible caution. And the first precept of our policy, the first lesson to be learned from our governmental activities during the past year, the lesson which all the workers and peasants must learn, is that we must be on the alert, we must remember that we are surrounded by people, classes and governments who openly express their intense hatred for us. We must remember that we are at all times but a hair’s breadth from every manner of invasion. (Lenin, Collected Works, Russian edition, Vol. XXVII, p. 117.) Clear, one would think!

Where does Zinoviev stand on the question of the victory of Socialism in one country ? Listen: When we speak of the final victory of Socialism we mean this much, at least: 1) the abolition of classes, and therefore 2) the abolition of the dictatorship of one class, in this case the dictatorship of the proletariat ... If we are to get a clearer idea of how the question stands here, in the USSR, in the year 1925 [says Zinoviev further], we must distinguish between two things: 1) the assured possibility of engaging in building Socialism-such a possibility, it stands to reason, is quite conceivable within the limits of one country; and 2) the complete construction and consolidation of Socialism, i.e., the achievement of a Socialist system, of a Socialist society. What can all this signify? It signifies that by the final victory of Socialism in one country Zinoviev means, not the guarantee against intervention and restoration, but the possibility of completely building Socialist society. And by the victory of Socialism in one country Zinoviev means the sort of Socialist construction which cannot and should not lead to the complete building of Socialism. Haphazard construction, construction without prospects, building Socialism although the complete construction of Socialist society is impossible-such is Zinoviev’s position. To build Socialism without the possibility of completing it; to build knowing that it cannot be completed-such are the absurdities in which Zinoviev has involved himself. But this is a mockery of the question, not a solution of it!

The industrialisation that Stalin began to construct and Lenin had hoped for would not be guided by German expertise, but instead Russians, and Russia was not without her experts, it just so happened that most of them had been designated class enemies during the revolution. Experts in engineering, logistics, architecture, chemistry and metallurgy and a vast range of other disciplines were freed from the prisons they had been languishing in. The notion of worker control, if it hadn’t been effectively crushed, was finally dropped at this point, as a generation of former ‘capitalists’ returned to the factories, now as obligatory party members. Before Lenin succumbed to ill health, he had begun initiatives to modernise Russia. Lenin believed that the modernisation of agriculture, by bringing electricity to peasant Russia, would enable collectivisation. It would help create huge agrarian communes that would provide Russia with enormous grain surpluses by providing a power source for modern farm machinery. This in itself would have a social and an ideological importance, jolting the peasantry out of centuries of tradition and therefore crafting them into a rural version of the proletariat. This in itself was a vital strand of Bolshevik strategy, as their support lay with the workers, not the peasants. In 1921 Lenin said to the 8th Party Congress that: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a small-peasant country, and we must clearly realise that. We are weaker than capitalism, not only on the world scale, but also within the country. That is common knowledge. We have realised it, and we shall see to it that the economic basis is transformed from a small-peasant basis into a large-scale industrial basis. Only when the country has been electrified, and industry, agriculture and transport have been placed on the technical basis of modern large-scale industry, only then shall we be fully victorious.”

The realities of Soviet ‘modernisation’ and its victims were beginning to be documented early after Lenin’s death. In 1926 a letter was written to the Central Committee of the Communist Party from men who had been released from the Sovoletsky Islands due to the destruction of their health, it is an extraordinary document of protest and gives us clear insights into the treat net of prisoners and the rationale behind it. It read: “We appeal to you, asking you to pay a minimum of attention to our request. We are prisoners who are returning from the Solovetsky concentration camp because of our poor health. We went there full of energy and good health, and now we are returning as invalids, broken and crippled emotionally and physically. We are asking you to draw your attention to the arbitrary use of power and the violence that reign at the Solovetsky concentration camp in Kemi and in all sections of the concentration camp. It is difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny, violence, and lawlessness. When we went there, we could not conceive of such a horror, and now we, crippled ourselves, together with several thousands who are still there, appeal to the ruling center of the Soviet state to curb the terror that reigns there. As though it weren’t enough that the Unified State Political Directorate [OGPU] without oversight and due process sends workers and peasants there who are by and large innocent (we are not talking about criminals who deserve to be punished), the former tsarist penal servitude system in comparison to Solovky had 99% more humanity, fairness, and legality. [...] People die like flies, i.e., they die a slow and painful death; we repeat that all this torment and suffering is placed only on the shoulders of the proletariat without money, i.e., on workers who, we repeat, were unfortunate to find themselves in the period of hunger and destruction accompanying the events of the October Revolution, and who committed crimes only to save themselves and their families

from death by starvation; they have already borne the punishment for these crimes, and the vast majority of them subsequently chose the path of honest labor. Now because of their past, for whose crime they have already paid, they are fired from their jobs. Yet, the main thing is that the entire weight of this scandalous abuse of power, brute violence, and lawlessness that reign at Solovky and other sections of the OGPU concentration camp is placed on the shoulders of workers and peasants; others, such as counterrevolutionaries, profiteers and so on, have full wallets and have set themselves up and live in clover in the Soviet State, while next to them, in the literal meaning of the word, the penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and back- breaking 14-16 hour days under the tyranny and lawlessness of inmates who are the agents and collaborators of the State Political Directorate [GPU]. If you complain or write anything (“Heaven forbid”), they will frame you for an attempted escape or for something else, and they will shoot you like a dog. They line us up naked and barefoot at 22 degrees below zero and keep us outside for up to an hour. It is difficult to describe all the chaos and terror that is going on in Kemi, Solovky, and the other sections of the concentrations camp. All annual inspections uncover a lot of abuses. But what they discover in comparison to what actually exists is only a part of the horror and abuse of power, which the inspection accidently uncovers. (One example is the following fact, one of a thousand, which is registered in GPU and for which the guilty have been punished: THEY FORCED THE INMATES TO EAT THEIR OWN FECES. “Comrades,” if we dare to use this phrase, verify that this is a fact from reality, about which, we repeat, OGPU has the official evidence, and judge for yourself the full extent of effrontery and humiliation in the supervision by those who want to make a career for themselves. [...] We are sure and we hope that in the All-Union Communist Party there are people, as we have been told, who are humane

and sympathetic; it is possible, that you might think that it is our imagination, but we swear to you all, by everything that is sacred to us, that this is only one small part of the nightmarish truth, because it makes no sense to make this up. We repeat, and will repeat 100 times, that yes, indeed there are some guilty people, but the majority suffer innocently, as is described above. The word law, according to the law of the GPU concentration camps, does not exist; what does exist is only the autocratic power of petty tyrants, i.e., collaborators, serving time, who have power over life and death. Everything described above is the truth and we, ourselves, who are close to the grave after 3 years in Solovky and Kemi and other sections, are asking you to improve the pathetic, tortured existence of those who are there who languish under the yoke of the OGPU’s tyranny, violence, and complete lawlessness.... To this we subscribe: G. Zheleznov, Vinogradov, F. Belinskii. Dec. 14, 1926 By 1926 the scope of the Gulag empire was rapidly expanding across Russia, camps like Sovoletsky were expanded to cover entire regions, such as the network of Kolyma camps in the far east. They had, after 1924, taken on a new role, they were no longer simply places to store troublesome or problematic individuals, but sites of industry. The new camp system would be the method with which Stalin would power the Soviet economy for the next three decades until his death, and the first project to receive special attention in the way was the construction of the White Sea Canal between 1931 and 1933. The year 1929, however, can be seen as a watershed moment in Not only Soviet, but Russian history. It was, according to Stalin a ‘Year of Great Change’, as he wrote in an article in Pravda. Stalin, in 1929 decisively broke with the NEP; the question that hung over the future direction of the Russian economy and society was answered by an end to private enterprise in the countryside, soon to be repeated in the towns and cities.

For the peasantry 1929 would be a year of almost unimaginable horrors; historians, economists and scientists tend to agree that Stalin’s war against the peasantry has left scars upon rural Russia that have yet to be healed, even as we progress into the 21st Century. The uneasy truce between the state and peasants had begun to break down; there were continual shortfalls in grain in towns and cities across Russia, a growing urban population (a product of Communist policy) created a increased pressure on Russian agriculture, and ideological and economic assumptions about collectivisation were dominant within the party. It was believed that the amalgamation of thousands of acres of peasant land, an end to the primitive Russian strip farming that had been the preferred method and the introduction of tractors and combine harvesters would boost Russian grain production. Soviet workers in the towns and cities who were starting to show signs of unrest over the lack of foodstuffs were perhaps unaware that one of the main sources of export revenue for the USSR was grain, it was how Stalin expected to pay for industrialisation, even at times of hunger in the Soviet state, food must be exported abroad. The other ideological assumption was that the Kulak, the wealthy, independent farmer, was an independent source of power in the villages, a rival on a local level to communist authority. The peasant rebellion of 1921 was fresh in the minds of most of the party faithful, and the words of Lenin, spoken during the electrification campaign in 1920, that the Communist Party was in a minority in much of Russia. For Stalin, equal parts cynic and paranoid, the Kulaks presented an unmissable opportunity to extend state power and settle some old scores with the peasantry, and also a chance to eliminate a social and economic force that might one day (in his fevered imagination) threaten the state. Stalin had already pioneered an anti Kulak pilot scheme in the Urals and Western Siberia in 1927-8. In 1928 he had said: “Agriculture is developing slowly, comrades. This is because we have about 25 million individually owned farms.

They are the most primitive and undeveloped form of economy We must do our utmost to develop large farms and to convert them into grain factories for the country organised on a modem scientific basis.” He later added: “”Look at the kulaks farms : their barns and sheds are crammed with grain. And yet they are holding onto this grain because they are demanding three times the price offered by the government.” leaving his audience in no doubt as to who he thought was responsible for food shortages. The anti Kulak method carried out in the east was called the Urals Method, and was a return to War Communism, grain was requisitioned on a ‘class basis’ with quotas set and Kulaks being forced to deliver five times the quota of other peasants. Failure to do so would result in a year’s forced labour (though many who entered the Gulag system had their sentences lengthened in an arbitrary fashion, or died long before their year was up). A key feature of the campaign was the incorporation of the poorer peasants in the persecution of the wealthier ones. The manipulation of the anger and resentment and jealousy of the peasantry was vital in legitimising the attack on the Kulaks, as well as dividing villages so as to isolate the state’s ‘class enemies’. Buoyed by the ‘success’ of this forced procurement, Stalin felt confident in extending it in 1929 to the rest of Russia. Collectivisation would be accompanied by social engineering of the most drastic and violent nature, with massive population shifts and an almost genocidal ruthlessness, De-kulakisation was as important as modernisation. In the next volume of this two part series we will look at the horrors inflicted on the peasantry in the name of modernisation, but in the mean time here is one final testimony from peasant Russia on the bloody year of 1929.

Mykola Pishy, the daughter of Kulak farmers remembered the cries of her mother, facing family starvation in 1929 after a visit from an NKVD detachment who took all the family’s grain and livestock. Her mother cried out: “Please leave us something. We’ve got five children in the family, they’ll die.” The lead of the squad callously replied: “I don’t care about your children, I care about my party ticket.” Few passages more succinctly encapsulate the essence of bureaucratic terror in Soviet Russia than this, but as we shall see in the next ebook, this was but the beginning.

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